January sparkled, dropped like a broken icicle, and was gone; February,
so eager for the sun that she shortens her days while lengthening her
searching evening hours, summoned one night the tyrant winds of March;
these shouted and blew the world awake, then yielded with a sigh to the
kiss of April's laughter. A disturbing sweetness ran upon the world,
agitating the hearts and minds of men. Yearning stirred even among deep
city slums; in the country hope and desire burst into glad singing.
Spring returned with her eternal magic. The hawthorn was in bloom.
The birds came back, filling the air with song, with the glance of wings
and the whirr of feathers, with the gold and confidence of coming summer.
The air was alive again with careless joy. Wimble responded instantly.
The thrill pierced to his very marrow. Memories revived like
wild-flowers, and his thoughts, shot with the gold and blue of lost
romance, turned to the open air. He got some sandwiches, mounted his
bicycle, and, followed by Joan, started in a southerly direction as once,
long years ago, he had escaped from streets and lectures to spend a day
with his beloved birds. This time, however, it was not the
willow-haunted Cambridge flats that were his aim. He took Joan with him
to the bare open downs above the sea.
It was a radiant morning, and a south-west wind blew gently in their
faces. Wimble's felt hat fluttered behind him at the end of a string, as
they skimmed down the sandy lanes towards Lewes, the smooth, scooped
hollows of the downs coming nearer every minute. Their majestic outline
seemed hung down from the sky itself, yet in spite of their mass they had
a light, almost transparent look in the morning brilliance. They melted
into the air. The noble line of them flung upwards the space as though
time met eternity and disappeared.
Down the long hill into the ancient town Joan shot past him. He noticed
her balance, and thought of the perfect equilibrium of a bird that shoots
full speed upon its resting-place, then stops, securely poised, making no
single effort to recover steadiness. For all its tiny legs, no bird
wobbles or overbalances, much less trips or stumbles. Joan flew ahead of
him, both hands off the bars. The careless gesture reminded him of the
matchless grace of the wagtail. He laughed aloud, coasting after her
unconscious ease with his own more deliberate, reasoned caution.
'She could fly to Africa without a guide!' he thought, aware for an
instant of the great subconscious rhythm in Nature birds obeyed
instinctively. No wonder their purposes were carelessly achieved.
'She's sure,' he added. 'Something very big takes care of her, and she
knows it.'
They walked up the steep hill out of the town, ran to the left along a
chalky lane, dipped in between the folds of grassy hills and great
covering fields, Joan leading always without hesitation. Once they
paused to watch the aerial evolutions of a body of plover, rising,
falling, tumbling, turning at full speed without confusion or collision,
as though one single telepathic sympathy operated throughout the entire
mass of individuals. Instinct the Primers called it, but Wimble,
recalling the Aquarian lecture, caught at another phrase--subconscious
unity. It was a power, at any rate, beyond man's conscious reasoning
mind. The careless safety of the birds amazed him. 'Air wisdom!' he
exclaimed aloud to Joan; 'we shall all have it some day!' It was odd how
that crazy lecture had lodged ideas in his thoughts, claiming
confirmation, returning again and again to his memory. They coasted down
a grassy track into a village, left their bicycles behind a farmer's
gate, and sat down a moment to recover breath. It was ten o'clock in the
morning.
From the tiny hamlet, where a few flint cottages and barns clustered
about an ivied church, they took the path southwards up the slope.
In the cup or the hills below them sheltered the toy buildings and the
trees. The rooks, advertising their clumsy flight and semi-human ways,
cawed noisily, playing in the gusty wind. They showed off consciously,
devoid of grace. One minute the scene was visible below, a perfect
miniature; the next it was hidden by a heavy shoulder of ground; the
earth had swallowed it, church, houses, trees, and all. No sound was
audible. Even the rooks had vanished. In front stretched an open and a
naked world. The human couple paused a moment and stared. The wind went
past their ears. There was a sense of immensity and freedom. There was
great light. They were on the Downs.
'Oh, Daddy,' cried Joan, 'we're out of England! This is the world!'
'And the world has blown wide open!' he replied. 'I feel everywhere at
once!' The gust whirled his words and laughter into space.
'The misunderstanding of streets and houses leaves----' he snatched at
the same time at his vanishing hat and seized the cord.
Joan flung herself backwards against the wind with arms spread out, her
hat in one hand and a blue-ribbon that had tied her hair fluttering in
the other. The loosened hair streamed past her neck, great strands of it
flattened against the curve of her back as well, her short skirts
flapping with a noise like sails. Then, turning about, she faced the
gust, and everything streamed the other way. The wind clapped the
clothes so tight against her slender figure that it seemed to undress
her, or rather made them fit as tight and neat as feathers. Like some
bird of paradise, indeed, she looked, the slim black legs straining to
take the air. She began to dance.
And as he watched the golden hair against the blue, there flashed into
him the memory of a distant day, when a saffron scarf had set his heart
on fire with strange airy yearnings, and the blue and golden earth had
danced to the tune of another spring. The tiny human outline amid this
vast expanse seemed wonderful, so safe, so exquisite, caught in some
rhythm born of the immensities of sky and earth and ocean. A mile to the
southward lay the sea. There was a taste of clover-honey, a tang of
salt, and the gorse laid its sweetness in between the two. Memories
crowded upon him as he watched Joan playing and dancing. The fervour and
earnestness of her pleasure exhilarated him. 'Blithe creature,' he said
to himself, 'you were surely born to fly!'--and remembered Mother as she
once had been and as she was now. Why had it all left her, this joyous
rapture of their early days together? Had the bird flown really from her
heart and into Joan? Was it not merely caged awhile? Had he himself not
helped to cage it? He recalled her radiant face beside the pond among
the emerald Cambridge fields, and the old first love poured back upon him
in a flood.
In a lull of the wind he caught the ecstatic singing of a lark, and at
the same moment Joan danced back to his side suddenly and seized his arm.
Her voice, it almost seemed, carried on the trill and music of the lark.
'It's all new as gold,' she cried. 'Everybody'd live for ever up here.
We must bring Mother. She'd flow fly flow all over!'
'Dance, my child,' he exclaimed, 'don't talk! Go on with your dancing.
It gives me ideas.'
'But you're always thinking,' she said, still breathless from her
exertions. 'It spoils everything, that thinking and thinking----'
'It's not thinking,' he interrupted, 'it's seeing. When you dance I see
things. I see everything at once. It's like a huge vision, yet so small
and simple that it's all in my head at once. It explains the universe
somehow to me. Thinking indeed! Why, I never thought in my life----'
'There's a bird for me, On the apple tree, It's explaining all the
garden,' sang the girl, dancing away towards the yellow gorse.
Her father's words conveyed no meaning to her; she had not listened.
He watched her. Her movements, he felt, obeyed the great unconscious
rhythm that breathes through nature, through the entire universe, from
the spinning midge to the most distant sun. Surely it must include
humanity as well, these millions of separate individuals who had lost it
temporarily, much as Mother had lost the 'bird.' He, too, was caught
along with it, as though he shared it, did it, danced it. He could see
what he could not say. He understood. Immense, yet at lightning speed,
the meaning of Air slid with that simple dancing deep into his heart.
It was unity of life everywhere that he saw interpreted, and the ease,
the grace, the carelessness were due to their being mothered and
inspired by Nature's great safe rhythm. Relying on this, as birds did,
there was safety, unerring intelligence, infallible guidance, flight from
Siberia to Abyssinia possible without a leader. Birds migrated at night,
he remembered, stopping at dawn to rest and sing, then going on again in
the twilight: surer of their inner guidance in the darkness than in the
blaze of daylight. Amazing symbol! Instinct, unconscious,
subconscious--whatever it might be called in rigid language, this deep
attitude, poised and steady, obeyed the mighty rhythm that realised the
underlying unity of all that lives, of everything. Thought breaks this
rhythm, which it should merely guide; reason reduces, opposes, and
finally interrupts it. His backward child--and she was still a child for
all her eighteen years--had somehow tapped it.
'Dance, my child, dance on!' he cried as he followed her. 'You dance joy
and brotherhood into my heart.' And, looking more like a mechanical
gollywog than a human being who has discovered truth, he floundered after
her as a gnome might chase a butterfly. Thus, swinging along between the
yellow gorse, over the tumuli, leaping the rabbit holes, he realised that
the love and joy he sought and dreamed about was here and now; not in
some future Golden Age, but at his very feet upon the earth. All that he
meant by Air and the Airy Consciousness was _now_. This little prophet
without a lyre saw it clear. Torn by the brambles, tripped by the holes,
he chased his marvellous dream as once, years before, he had chased an
elusive streak of gold across the Cambridge flats. He was caught by the
elemental rhythm of the Downs, borrowed in its turn from the suns of
uttermost space that equally obeyed and shared it.
He looked about him. Immense domed surfaces, smooth as a pausing ocean,
stretched undulating to dim horizons; air lifted the earth into
immaterial space; they intermingled; and sight roved everywhere without a
break. Upon this vast expanse there were no details to enchain
attention, blocking the rhythm of the eye; no points of interest stood
up, as in mere 'scenery,' to fasten feeling to a limited area.
Enjoyment soared, unconfined, on wings. He saw no barriers, no trees, no
hedges or divisions; no summits startled him with 'See, how big I am!'
all self-asserting items lacked. Wind, sky, and sea offered their
unconditioned, limitless invitation. Even the flowers were unobtrusive,
the ragwort, thyme, and yellow gorse claimed no deliberate notice, and
the thistle-down flew past like air made visible. It was, in a word,
this liberation from detail, snapping attention with definite objects,
that set him free in mind, as Joan already proved herself free in action.
Earth here was sublimated into air.
'Good heavens!' his heart cried out. 'It's here, it's now--this new
thing coming from the Air!'
This deep rhythm of the landscape caught his very feet, making even his
physical movements elastic, springy, sharing the rise and fall of flight
expressed in the waving surface of the world about him. He no longer
stumbled. Joan's dancing, though apparently she merely leapt to catch
the thistle-down, or played with her flying hair and fluttering ribbon,
interpreted in the gestures of her young lithe figure all he felt, but
reproduced it unconsciously.
This was, indeed, not England, but the world.
'We're over the edge of everything,' sang Joan, catching at his hand.
'Hold up, Daddy! Hold up!' She tugged him along to join her wild, happy
dance. 'You ought to sing. We're over the edge of the world!'
'Above it,' he cried breathlessly. 'We're in the air. Look out, my
dear----!'
She had suddenly released his hand and sent him spinning with the
unaccustomed momentum. Her yellow hair vanished beyond a sea of golden
gorse. Her figure melted against it, she was out of sight. 'I'm not a
bird yet, at any rate,' he gasped, settling to rest upon a convenient
mound and mopping his forehead. 'Not in body, at least. I've got no
balance to speak of. I think too much--probably.' He heard her singing
somewhere far behind him, and again a lark overhead took up the note and
bore it into space.
But with the repose of his creaking muscles and elderly body, the rhythm
he had tried to dance now slipped under his ageless and untiring soul.
Like a rising wind the Downs were under him and he was up. Seeking a
point to settle on, his eye found only strong, subtle lines against the
blue, and running along these lines, his spirit was flung forwards with
them, upward into limitless space. No peak, no precipice blocked their
endless utterance; they flowed, they flew, and Wimble's heart flew with
them. The sense of unity, characteristic of airy freedom, invaded his
soul triumphantly with its bird's-eye view. He saw life whole beneath
him. Perhaps he dozed, perhaps he even slept; at any rate he knew this
strange perspective that showed him life, with its huge freight of
plodding humanity, rising suddenly into the air.
To rely upon inner, subconscious guidance was to rely upon that portion
of his being--that greater portion--which obeyed spontaneously an immense
rhythm of the mothering World-Spirit. Thought broke this rhythm; Reason
was clever but not wise. The subconscious powers, knowing nothing, yet
approached omniscience; enjoyed omnipresence, while still being _here_.
In that state his individuality pooled in sympathy with all others
everywhere, tapping a universal wisdom which is available to intuition
but not to argument, and is so simple that a child, a bird, may know it
easily, singing and dancing its expression naturally. Unerring,
infallible, it is the rhythm of divinity, it is reliance upon deity.
This germ of understanding sprouted in his heart, and practice would
develop it. He realised himself linked up, not alone with Nature, but
with the entire human family--and hence, with Mother. The practice, it
was obvious, began with Mother. He must see to it at once. Yet, though
clear as crystal in his heart, in his mind it all remained confused, too
shy for language, so that he recalled what the railway guard had said--it
cannot yet be told, but it can be lived.
His heart flew like a bird through empty space, above all obstacles,
above all barriers. There was no detail to enchain attention, nothing to
obscure free vision; the soul in him, grand super-bird, took flight.
The airy attitude to life became divinely clear and simple, because, with
this bird's perspective, he saw life whole. Details that blocked
creative energy on earth with fear and difficulty, seemed negligible
after all; they were places to take off from. As wings trust carelessly
for support upon the universal, ethereal element enveloping them, so
could, so must, his will know faith and safety in the immense and
powerful rhythms that guide that delicate thrush, the redwing, from
Siberia to England every autumn, and steer Sirius unleashed,
untroubled, towards his eternal goal. He watched the little wheatears,
back from Africa, flitting from perch to perch of tufted grass, soon to
leave for their summer in distant Norway. Obedient to this serene and
mighty guidance, secure upon these everlasting wings, he saw the bird in
humanity open its wings at last. A new reliance upon subconscious
inspiration, linking all together, from the butterfly to the angel,
flashed through him, air its symbol, wings and flight its emblem.
He realised, with an instant's strange intensity, the unity of
indivisible air manifested in all forms of life the planet bore.
This undetailed space about him inspired him oddly, it symbolised his
dream, the dream that had haunted him since earliest youth. He looked
_down_ upon the world beneath him, upon the stretch of years he had flown
over, upon the congested streets and houses where men lived, upon the
iron conventions and traditions imprisoning their minds from escape into
freedom that yet lay so close. The element of earth weighed still
heavily upon them; earth builds forms; air, being form-less, offered
liberty. He saw these million forms already crumbling; he saw the masses
at the upper windows, on the roofs, all looking--up. With the coming of
air, the day of forms was passing. The ferment, the unrest, the
universal questing shone in these upturned eyes. They would not look
down again. The vital force had drained out of a thousand forms which
have served their day; no past tradition was absolute; they had found it
out. Everywhere he saw the emergence of this new spirit, leaving behind
it the empty, unsatisfying forms, yearning for fuller self-expression
that the unifying ethereal element of air now promised. The roofs were
strangely crowded. He saw the myriad figures. He saw that some of them
already sang and danced!
Already the new mighty rhythm caught them whirling into space, each soul
more and more _en rapport_ with the universal world-soul. Into their
hearts, with the lift of wings and a happy bird-like song, it stole
subconsciously; the formulae of doctrine which change and shift were
giving place to inner experience, and inner experience cannot be
destroyed, since it is formless, acknowledging no boundaries, obedient to
no creed. Form was dying, life was being born. . . .
He watched the tumbling plover, the sea-gulls grandly sailing, the
soaring lark; the floating thistledown went past along the careless wind;
he saw his un-thinking daughter's natural, happy dancing, one and all
interpreting this message of the air, this promise of liberty that
brimmed his deep heart and his uneducated mind. The huge simplicity of
the naked Downs made him see existence singularly as a whole; across the
open sweep before him the air came sweetly, blowing the tangle of
artificial living into easy rhythm and dancing everywhere.
He saw the accidental barriers between creed and sect and nation blown
away. A new spiritual unity took their place, a synthetic life, the
parts highly specialised, as with birds, yet the whole in perfect
harmony. The day of special, exclusive dispensations had disappeared,
and this organic spiritual unity, with its new religion of service,
lifted the people as with mighty wings.
'Dance on, my child! dance on!' he cried, 'it makes me see things whole!'
He watched her light, flying movements against the sea of yellow gorse,
the hair like a saffron scarf upon the wind, her radiant face shining and
laughing with the blue of endless space behind it. She did not heed his
words; she danced away again; she seemed one with the tumbling plover,
the sailing sea-birds, and the drifting thistle-down. She danced with
the Spring, and the air was in her heart.
The spirit quickened in him as he saw her. His consciousness, he knew,
was but a fragment of an immense and deeper consciousness, of limitless
scope and powers; this greater self made affirmations to which no mere
intellect would dare to set the boundaries. With the air there was a
return of joy, belief and wonder into a world that has too long denied
all three. Intellect might stand aside a little longer, watching
cautiously, like Mother, the flights of intuition, that flashing bird of
fire that strikes and vanishes; but science, hitherto destructive
chiefly, must enter a new field or be discredited. It must become
constructive, it must examine spiritual states. The barrier between the
organic and the inorganic was already breached.
'Dance on! My heart flies dancing with you!'
With you! Rather with everything and every one! For he had this curious
inspiration, as though all his past condensed now into a single moment--
that a new attitude, due to the subliminal consciousness becoming
consciously organised with its myriad and mighty powers, was stealing
down into the hearts of men from the air. Since its outstanding
characteristic was a fuller understanding, a natural sharing,
a deep, instinctive sympathy, it involved an actual realisation of
spiritual unity that intellect alone has never yet achieved, and never
can. It was no flabby, Utopian, idealistic brotherhood he saw, but
a practical, co-operative life based upon those greater powers, and upon
that completer understanding lying, hid with God, in the subliminal
regions of humanity. Experienced hitherto sporadically, only, he saw
in what his heart called the promise of the air, their universal
acceptance and development. . . . In a second of time, this all flashed
into him as he watched the dancing little human figure on the gigantic
landscape. And after it, if not actually with it, rose that
unaccountable, uneasy, half-terrible emotion of deep-seated pain he had
known before--the shudder . . . He trembled, tried to sing. Then the
gorse pricked him where he lay. He turned to make himself more
comfortable. He wriggled. The attempt to sing tickled his throat and he
coughed.
He sat up, feeling in his pockets for a pencil and paper. For the first
time in his life he felt he must write. 'I must give it out,' he mumbled
to himself. 'It's so wonderful, so simple. I must share it. I must
tell it to others--to everybody.' He actually made some notes.
'Ah,' he thought, as he read them over a few days later, 'they're no
good. I don't _quite_ understand them now, to tell the truth.'
He sighed. 'I'm only muddled,' he decided, 'just a Man in the Street
bewildered by a touch of inspiration that blew into me!'
He lay watching Joan for a little longer, dancing in the middle distance
still. The zest of a bird was in her, the toss, the scamper.
Lithe, spinning, sure, her movements interpreted the air far more clearly
than his thoughts could compass it in words. Her song came to him with
the breeze. He watched her, then waved the packet of sandwiches above
his head. He was hungry. They ate their lunch, and spent the rest of
the day exploring the great spaces round them.
It was evening when they got home; they heard the random sweetness of the
thrush's song among the laurels on the lawn; a nightjar was churning in
the dusk beyond; there was a subdued and tiny chattering of the swallows
in the eaves. They found Mother among the flower-beds, wearing her big
garden-gloves. Wimble took her in his arms and kissed her.
'It's come, Mother, it's come,' he whispered against her cheek.
'And, d'you know?--you've been with us all day long.'
She looked up, peaceful and happy, a smell of garden earth about her, and
the glow of the sunset in her eyes. 'Have I really, Joe dear?' she said.
'How lovely!' And then she added: 'I believe it is; yes, I believe it
is.'
Next morning Wimble woke very, very early--close upon three o'clock.
He peered out of the window a moment. The dawn, he saw with a happy sigh
of wonder, was just beginning to break. The gleam of light fell upon
Mother's face; and the singing of a lark high up in the clearing air came
to him. At the same moment Mother moved in her bed close by; her heavy
breathing was interrupted. He listened. She was talking in her sleep,
though the words were indistinguishable. He waited, thinking she might
get up and walk. Her eyes, however, did not open; she lay still again.
He slipped over to tuck the blankets more securely round her.
'Bless her!' he thought. 'She's asleep! Her surface consciousness is
merged with her deep, safe, wise subconsciousness----' And his thought
broke off abruptly. It had suddenly occurred to him that the
sleep-walker and the migrating bird both found their way unerringly in
the darkness, both obedient to inner guidance. He stood still an
instant, looking down upon her face in the pale morning light.
'Who, what guides the redwing over hills, and vales, and seas?' he
whispered. 'Who, what guides the sleep-walker amid the intricacies of
Maple furniture?' He chuckled to himself. It was odd how the comic
Aquarian lecture cropped up in his memory like this once more.
He bent down and kissed her lightly on the cheek, then went back to bed.
Mother still mumbled in her sleep--' Flow, fly, flow,' he seemed to
catch, 'it's coming, coming . . . '
'It's the bird returning to her heart,' he whispered to himself.
Deep down inside her being something sang; outside, the carolling of the
lark continued, blithe and joyous in the breaking dawn. As he fell
asleep, the two sounds were so curiously mingled that they seemed almost
indistinguishable. . . .
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.